


Midnight Boxcars

by LithiumDoll



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 15:00:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17143922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LithiumDoll/pseuds/LithiumDoll
Summary: He doesn’t know where he picks up the set of cheap, red plastic dice. Probably from one of shelters.Two sixes are boxcars, Nate tells him, breath sour with whiskey and meds.Midnight, Dory disagrees. They go back to arguing over their chess game; he never sees them again.





	Midnight Boxcars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PR Zed (przed)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, PRZed!

Nick runs, Nick hides, and somewhere along the way, Nick forgets how to stop. Nick forgets a lot of things: his father’s desperation—

_Don’t make any decisions that any Watcher can track_

—rules his life like a Pusher buried it in him, and the concept of planning for a future is gone like a Wiper ripped it out.

The first few months on the streets aren’t a blur so much as they’re _gone_. Not because someone took them from him, he doesn’t think. Just one way or another, he took them from himself. It’s probably for the best. Long after everything, his nightmares are all cold nights and hard hands, and murmured words he doesn’t understand, though he tries as hard as he can. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

(A sad, bird-like woman, with lank blonde hair and deep shadows under her eyes finds him on the second night, huddled in the doorway of a boarded-up dollar store. She knew his father, she says. She knew his mother. She knew Ezra, whoever that was. She’s so, so sorry that she can’t do more than press a few crumpled notes into his hands, but it will be okay, she promises. In the end, he’ll be okay.

He forgets her too.)

He doesn’t know where he picks up the set of cheap, red plastic dice. Probably from one of the shelters. _Two sixes are boxcars_ , Nate tells him, breath sour with whiskey and meds. _Midnight_ , Dory disagrees. They go back to arguing over their chess game; he never sees them again.

One roll and his path is chosen for him: boxcars he stays, but two through eleven and he’s on the rails, rattling randomly from LA to New York, Detroit to New Orleans. It’s better than a blind pin in a map, because it kind of feels like they’re in it together, like they’re looking out for him.

Like magic, they never come up boxcars.

Except magic’s for kids and he stops believing in it when two men in dark, rumpled suits follow a little too close and a little too long, and his heart starts hammering in his chest, because he _knows_.

Their pace picks up and by the time he darts from the sidewalk to the alley he has seconds, if that, before they’re on him.

His feet thud down on cracked concrete; they shout as he jumps. He reaches for the top of the wire fence and he’s going to slip, he _does_ slip, before it bends with a metallic shriek towards his desperate hands. Fingers find a purchase and then he’s up, and over, and down.

He lands in a crouch and scrambles to his feet.

And he runs.

Later, lost in the crush of the food kitchen, he studies the dice in his gloved palm with a dull rage. He wants to throw them away, because he had to book it from the first real job he’s ever been able to land, even if it is only bussing tables, and the first people who smiled when they saw him, _and it’s all their fault_.

He throws the dice as hard as he can, but they never hit the wall. Instead, they spin in the air an inch from his outflung hand, and he hunches his shoulders at the gasps and muttering around him.

And he runs again.

The Sniffers get close, more than once, but never _as_ close and, after a couple years, he doesn’t see them at all.

Lingering in a city for a couple of weeks becomes a tentative month, then two. The dice allow him to spend a full winter in Miami and he wonders if maybe he’s been forgotten—if he’s too much trouble. Who was he anyway?

The more he tells himself that, the better it sounds.

Jonah and Nicole’s stupid, throw-away kid: no one to anyone.

He relaxes enough that he almost gets pulled in by the actual cops once or twice, just because they’re so far from what he considers a real threat they’re not on his radar and honestly, it’s hard to remember that anyone, anywhere, might think he’s a child. Might think he can’t take care of himself.

Hell, by sixteen, he thinks he must have travelled every railroad there is.

He’s seventeen when he hits Coney Island and hires on for tourist season for the second time. The money’s not great, but no one asks questions. It’s odd to recognize faces. To be recognized in return. It's disconcerting and he isn’t sure he likes it, but it’s not like it matters, because the girl riding in the blue car on the big wheel steals his breath away.

Like the dice rolled and everything came up easy.

Kira figures out what he can do first. Honestly, there’s a good chance he’d never have worked her out—he wasn’t looking for a Pusher and he doesn’t care: it doesn’t matter to him.

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeats, slowly. Like they don’t even speak the same language. “You’re not worried I’ll Push you off a bridge?”

He doesn’t know how to tell her that he’s never made his own decisions—that he likes her better than a roll of the dice, but it’s all the same.

“You going to?” he asks, instead. He means to tease, but he sounds something like wistful.

“No,” she says, and her frown deepens. “Never. I’d never do that.”

“Okay,” he agrees, and tells her he loves her. Maybe she says it back.

A month later, Kira’s gone and she’s not returning his calls and, for the first time, he’s not running—he’s chasing. And he’s still going nowhere.

He doesn’t mean to give up, exactly, but in the end he’s staring down at a cluster of empty shot glasses, and he doesn’t have it in him to make one more move on his own.

The dice roll him to the docks, and that seems about right.

He works his way to Tokyo port, and in the craziest way, it’s like coming home. It shouldn’t be—he’s never been easier to pick out—but in the press and the anonymity, he feels like he’s hit solid ground.

When the dice roll him on again, he packs slowly.

For Malaysia.

For Hong Kong.

There are enough expats, students, tourists and transients that he blends seamlessly. He finds work in the kitchen of a restaurant, where he can practice his terrible Cantonese amongst people who laugh and shake their head, and remember his name.

With a few games of street craps to supplement his income, he can even cobble together enough money to rent a room. It’s almost like he’s building a life.

It’s small, and it’s lonely, and he knows the instant he tries to hold onto it, it’s gone.

But it's his.

He rolls the dice once a month; they always fall on midnight.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you wendelah1, minim calibre and doccy for the speedy beta at wow short notice!


End file.
